News

In the media - Gareth has come full circle

7 September 2010

Con graduate and ARIA Award winner Gareth Koch has been appointed a lecturer in guitar at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music.

Koch, renowned internationally for his playing, is a founding member of the Saffire guitar quartet and has released nine solo and collaborative albums, including Saffire, which won the ARIA for best classical album.

Following his studies at The Con, he spent a decade working in Europe, undertook two years of post-graduate study in classical guitar at the Royal Madrid Conservatorium and another year at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

He also has a PhD from the University of Newcastle where he was senior lecturer in classical guitar.

Koch, who was born in Milan, spent his high school and matriculation years in Tasmania, and said in an interview with the Hobart Mercury:

"I've finally fulfilled one of my lifelong ambitions, which was to return to Tasmania. It's the closest thing to home for me as the itinerant person I've always been.

"When I heard the guitar as a 12-year-old in Spain something much more profound happened and I knew this was what I wanted to do.

"My passion for flamenco was later diverted into rock music. It enabled me to experience a similar intensity which was what interested me in the first place. It was the rawness of it.

So I traded in my clarinet for an electric guitar.''

He has enlisted the assistance of fellow Saffire members Slava Grigoryan and Karin Schaupp as guest tutors/performers, leading Australian guitar composer Phillip Houghton and Sydney Conservatorium of Music's lecturer in classical guitar Gregory Pikler.